Wildlife friendly business

Working with agencies, organisations and projects to map the nature-friendly businesses operating in their area, and to understand more about how the local nature-based business economy works and what can be done to make it stronger.

What business is out there?

Making nature-friendly business a significant part of our economy can’t happen if we don’t know what nature-friendly businesses we already have out there doing good things. So, part of what we do is map the nature friendly businesses in an area – who are they, what do they do, in what ways are they nature-friendly? 

How do their supply chains work?

We also want to know how to strengthen a local nature-friendly economy, so we talk to the businesses about how their supply chains work and what they think would make a real difference to their business – where do they get their raw materials from, where are their markets, what is easier or harder for them because of their nature-friendly focus, what are their aspirations for the future, what support would really benefit their business and is this any different because of being nature-friendly?

What can be achieved by doing more together?

We can then work with individuals, groups, businesses, organisations and agencies to use this information to unlock ideas and plans for how to grow the local nature-friendly economy. For example, we are currently working with Natural Resources Wales to put together a cross-Anglesey cycling route, where we can point out the various nature-friendly businesses along the route or near to it so that there is more chance of cyclists knowing that they’re there and then actually using them, and we’re using our art skills to create a visually appealing and unique map of the route. 

Our approach is based on a number of different elements:

  • We want to get to the point where being a nature-friendly business brings business advantage.
  • We know from experience that collaboration works, and in the context of Nearly Wild, we think that it could work for everyone if can bring together different sorts of businesses into some sort of complementary ‘package’. So, we’re trialling this as part of our Arwain-funded project in Powys.
  • We think there is huge value where a business can bring benefit that is really local (employing local people, using local raw material, providing a service or product that local people need or want), but we also want to find out how nature-friendly business can be scaled up to have a bigger impact.